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By Jonathan StempelREUTERS • Thursday February 7, 2013 6:39 AM

NEW YORK — A U.S. judge yesterday dismissed Iraq’s lawsuit accusing dozens of companies of
conspiring with Saddam Hussein’s regime to frustrate the United Nations’ oil-for-food program and
depriving Iraqis of about$10 billion in essential aid.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said the government of Iraq could not recover damages and other
remedies under an anti-racketeering law because most of the wrongful conduct took place in foreign
countries.

He also said Iraq failed to show that the companies’ conduct was a key reason for the injury,
and that laws governing sovereign nations did not let the current government escape responsibility
for Hussein’s abuses.

“The court rejects Iraq’s view that it may sidestep responsibility because the conduct was
illegal or the actors held power illegitimately,” he wrote.

More than 90 companies, subsidiaries and affiliates were named as defendants in the 2008 lawsuit
over the$64.2 billion oil-for-food program, which ran from 1996 to 2003.

Among them were the French bank BNP Paribas SA, which administered a U.N. escrow account for the
program; Swiss engineering company ABB Ltd.; Dutch chemicals company Akzo Nobel; U.S. oil company
Chevron Corp.; German automaker Daimler AG; British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline; and German
electronics company Siemens.

“It is clearly the right decision,” said Robert Bennett, an attorney for BNP Paribas. “I am
enormously pleased.”

James Gillespie, an attorney for ABB, said Stein “followed the arguments in the defendants’
papers very closely, and in our view correctly applied the law.”

Christian Siebott, an attorney for Iraq, did not respond to requests to comment.

The U.N. program let Iraq sell oil to finance the purchase of food, medicine and other goods for
citizens hurt by international trade sanctions.